PH115 Final

So the main idea behind this shoot is to add abstraction between texture and architexture. The

project will be loosely based on Colburns early work with vortographs because of the opics used to make the initial images. Other than that there will be little influence of his work in this project. The strongest images to the viewer will be the most abstracted from reality, so my concept is removal from reality. Since all the images will be of architexture there will be key shapes to focus on to help bring the project from reality to a more dreamlike, lucid, state. It would be hard to discribe what a viewer would see since it isn't a concrete item I will be photographing. So a lot of the viewer's ideas of what it could be would be projection. These images will be geometric and breakdown into the basic elements of design, while trying to keep the dream like concept in shape. Keeping a smaller square format will also keep it to being a quite and more elegant in design. The small size would also make it so to truly see the images one would have to go up closer to them, and the closeness makes it more personal for the dreamlike state the images appear to be in. The images even since they don't have a spoonfed story, because honestly if something was spoon fed that is like this project it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. The images should have a painterly feel and not feel like they are an actual photograph. For me, the images come off as a bit of a motion dream, where one has to go somewhere but they aren't sure where the destionation might be. The images hopefully will envoke a bit of serenity into the viewer with the mostly deep blues for a color connection for the viewer, also the blue is a symbol of sleep. The main techniques used will be to use a fast mid length telephoto lens to compress and give a tack sharp focus point that can drop other details out of focus. The speed of the lens will also allow me to use an ultra fast shutter at a very low “Iso” to make sure there isn't any motion blur most of the shutter speeds used will be roughly over 1/1,000^th of a second or faster in broad daylight. On more cloudy days it will be a bit different but the thought process is the same since the effect won't work as well beyond 1/500^th of a second.

Visulization Final Project

 So my final project in my Visualization class is going to be more graphic versions of my Vortographs. Utilizing the similar ideas of what I have done in the past but instead of making these more of an explosion of imagery I want them to be a bit more graphic. I feel like some of these have accomplished that. This body of work does need more work to it but I feel like it is on the right track to being completed.

Photography Final

Well after a long week of printing, work, and league of legends, I have finally gotten to the press mounting part of my final. The photos are from the work in progress of what my final looks like. They were taken on my iPhone 4s, which I was kind of thinking about posting more images from my iPhone since it is basically a point and shoot camera. It all depends I guess on what images I take. It's been a hell of a week though and life with out a car kinda sucks for getting in cut may board around.

Well I present this final tomorrow and it took me a while to do all my mounting. For future reference it is easier to have the board that I mount on be about 1x1 inches smaller than the image. It helps for finals but not final products. Hopefully it gets a stellar grade but there are 3 images that didn't print as well as I hoped. Between all the junk going on in my life right now I am slowly becoming mentally drained as I begin to play more games now. Anyway I have almost kept this blog for a year now and wow. How a year has passed. I am still going to be posting and hopefully next year will be better and show even more improvements. I do want to go to some comedy clubs on the regular soon and start taking photos at them. Which would be pretty fun.

Getting Vortographic Part IV

    So I went to Haight to do the next part of my Vorographs and this is what has become of it. I have been getting a lot better with my current optic that I made to make these vortographs. I feel like I am getting more graphic in my design of these. In my first post, I just started to explore my options and range with the optic and I slowly began to understand the entire breadth of what the optic I made could do.

I have gotten a lot of comments about the optic while shooting, most people saying that is a freaky lens. Some wondering what it is doing, others just doing weird stares. I don't blame them for wondering but for something that cost me 2 dollars and a can of Pringles it is possibly the cheapest and most fun I have had with an optic I have ever bought for my camera.

Soon I will be making some more, with higher quality builds and showing them off but for now my prototype is doing a swell job. I am proud of it.

Strolling Through the City

So recently I went on a stroll with Mahkayla, Brianna and her new pup Huey. I did these while working on my other series of vortographs which is still in progress of being completed. Progress of being completed of course go along with my final grade, and not with my whole process of making vortographs. I do want to try out making a new style of optic for the vorotgraphs in the near future, but right now I need to stick with the formula I have now and carry on like a boss. Hopefully I will be able to have some pretty stellar finished optics by the time I am done with this vortograph series.

Since I am going to continue making the vortographs I figured I might as well draw up plans and get a finished final blueprint for them. I have a couple of ideas on how to draw them up since I took some engineering classes back in highschool but most of my plans look like a scribbles of a mad man. It is kind of entertaining to make them out. I don't want to post them online unfortunately but if everything goes well there is a possibility something might pop up for the first tool I used in the future.

Not that I am trying to hide how I make my images from my readers, I just would like to keep my test items a bit secluded. If everyone knows how to make them, then they won't be as magical and surreal. Sure the images look like they could be double, triple, or quad exposures but that is part of the fun.

Vortographs the Third

     Well I sort of lied to you guys, my faithful readers. This entry will also be about my exploration in Vortographs. I am beginning to really love shooting like this and all of the editing you will see on the blog has been done in camera raw so nothing crazy. The infrared tutorial will happen this month. Probably this weekend but the next few entries will be on Vorotgraphs.


     Now some of you might wonder who invented the Vortograph? Well that is Alvin Langdon Coburn he did the series for about a year and some tried to replicate his style and his equipment used to make the images. Now I have an item I used that has a similar effect, but it isn't the same. It isn't suppose to be the same though, it is suppose to give me the abstracted qualities, but that is it. It does just that, and I am thankful when I took the leap into doing this project everything has been running smoothly with it.

   That being said I have tons of these images now. Between school and work I don't have a lot of time to study it a lot then work on it in bursts like I used to study things so now my study on Vortographs will hopefully extend into years. I would love to surpass Alvin Coburn in understanding how they work and in getting new and more exciting images from my riggings.

   All the images from my second post about Vortographs onwards are stuff I am working into a photoset and hopefully will be on another website that will be linked to after it is finished. It is going to be about abstracted details of San Francisco. The title is still in progress but it is going to focus on shape and color more than anything else. The Vortographs can alter the shapes and the reality around us. In a way it feels very cubist as a form of photography.



 

Vortographs Continued

The first attempted at seeing if the vortograph optic I made work is here. Now that I have a working optic I took it out on a walk from the Ferry building in San Francisco to my apartment a little over a mile or so away. So these images are for my final in PH100 none of these are finalized yet for the final product but they might be used in the project. These vortographs are a lot better than the first couple I did out front of my apartment window.

Now that should have been a given that the images would be better considering more effort had been put into making them but the first images were proof of concept that the optic worked!

So these are apart of a larger project called Details of the City. There will be a lot more images eventually because this is just the start of the entire project. This project will look at some of the details in a lot of the buildings and possibly streets of San Francisco. It all depends on how it plays out but there will be more things to come dealing with the project and some other projects.

Coming up will be some editing tutorials. Hopefully the next entry will be the Infrared tutorial.

Vortographs

Taking a quick break from building an infrared photoshop tutorial I realized that I needed to start getting my midterms done. So I breezed though my school work and then I remembered my assignment for PH100, I had to brainstorm and shoot some of my final. Well how can I make this interesting? I went through my simple idea list thinking this might be fun and then I realized I didn't want anything that could be easy, or simple, or semi fun to do.

My first idea was to go on and do light painting at tourist spots of San Francisco. The idea would have been great fun but I wanted to build a L.E.D. light stick and other strange things with RGB L.E.D. lights so that wasn't going to work out in my favor for my budget. Then I remembered about vortographs.

The images I shot have only been changed in tone, no other editing has been done to them. So these are a couple vortographs from outside my apartment window.